The invention relates to bus data transfers. In particular, the invention relates to reducing the number of lines used to transfer bus data.
One example of a bus used to transfer data is shown in FIG. 1. FIG. 1 is an illustration of a receive and transmit gain controllers (GCs) 30, 32 and a GC controller 38 for use in a wireless communication system. A communication station, such as a base station for user equipment, transmits (TX) and receives (RX) signals. To control the gain of these signals, to be within the operating ranges of other reception/transmission components, the GCs 30, 32 adjust the gain on the RX and TX signals.
To control the gain parameters for the GCs 30, 32, a GC controller 38 is used. As shown in FIG. 1, the GC controller 38 uses a power control bus, such as a sixteen line bus 34, 36, to send a gain value for the TX 36 and RX 34 signals, such as eight lines for each. Although the power control bus lines 34, 36 allow for a fast data transfer, it requires either many pins on the GCs 30, 32 and the GC controller 38 or many connections between the GCs 30, 32 and GC controller 38 on an integrated circuit (IC), such as an application specific IC (ASIC). Increasing the number of pins requires additional circuit board space and connections. Increasing IC connections uses valuable IC space. The large number of pins or connections may increase the cost of a bus depending on the implementation.
Accordingly, it is desirable to have other data transfer approaches.
A hybrid serial/parallel bus interface has a data block demultiplexing device. The data block demultiplexing device has an input configured to receive a data block and demultiplexes the data block into a plurality of nibbles. For each nibble, a parallel to serial converter converts the nibble into serial data. A line transfers each nibble""s serial data. A serial to parallel converter converts each nibble""s serial data to recover that nibble. A data block reconstruction device combines the recovered nibbles into the data block.